Mystic Leeway

Book excerpt: Who is Frances Gregg? In her youth she was a poet in her own right, a friend of Ezra Pound, and an intimate of Hilda Doolittle and John Cowper Powys. In our literary history, particularly the history of Modernism, she has been a mysterious presence. Now, with this publication for the first time of The Mystic Leeway, we have Gregg's testament to her lovers, her life, her deeply troubled times, and to Art. Written over the three years before her tragic death in the bombing of Plymouth in 1941, this memoir marks the course of Gregg's journey, both spiritual and physical, through a passionate life. With painful and amusing honesty, Gregg records her experience of other icons of Modernism, including William Butler Yeats, May Sinclair, Alice Meynell, George Moore, Jacob Epstein, Walter Rummel, and Louis Wilkinson.